Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Samin Nosrat

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Michele joins chef Samin Nosrat, author of the New York Times bestseller Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, to tell stories of Nosrat’s mother’s kitchen, who and what else shaped her as she grew up, and a very special trip Nosrat took to her native Iran when she was just a kid.Samin Nosrat is a San Diego-born, Oakland-based chef, writer, and teacher. Netflix’s documentary series Salt Fat Acid Heat, based on her book, was released in 2018. She has also starred in Netflix’s children’s cooking series Waffles + Mochi (produced by Higher Ground Productions), and co-hosted the podcast Home Cooking with Hrishikesh Hirway.Nosrat began her cooking career at Alice Waters’ acclaimed Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. She went on to work in Italy alongside chefs Benedetta Vitali and Dario Cecchini, and at (the now-closed) Eccolo in Berkeley. She is currently at work on a second book.Find the episode transcript here: https://www.audible.com/ymk/episode16 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Come on in, come on in. We have something special today. I'm with the chef, Simeen Nosrat. She wrote one of the most acclaimed cookbooks of the past 50 years and we're in her kitchen. A place she rarely lets outsiders invade. So this is a real treat for the listeners. This is where Samine creates, tastes, and perfects her famous recipes. And today, Samine shares a recipe that is especially

important to her. Chicken soup. So, and you walked in here with, are those lemons? Oh, yeah, we have a lemon tree just to cut. Okay, those are post-nuclear lemons. Yeah, that's a lemon tree. That's a lemon tree. The soup just hits some magical space where the aroma just filled up the kitchen.

My senses are on overload. There we go. Mmm. Oh my goodness, the lemon. Mmm. That is delicious. Oh good. My mom would be like, eat more lemon.

Not so or enough. No, it's perfect. Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen. The podcast where we explore how the food and culinary traditions of our youth shape who we become as adults. I'm Michele Norris. We're going to learn more about the origins of that delicious soup and why it's so important to Samine in this episode.

But first, a word about her background. It was her breakout cookbook that first made Samine a household name. That book, Salt, Fat, Acid Heat, opened up the eyes of home cooks everywhere, on how to elevate flavor by mastering those four elements. A good cookbook is almost like reading a good memoir. You learned something about the author, and hidden inside Simeon No Srot's pages, a very personal journey that started in her mama's kitchen. That lemony chicken soup you heard us tasting at the top of this episode, that tart savory and then tart once again soup was inspired, not just by her mother's Iranian home cooking,

but also by a long hidden memory, a very special trip that Samin took with her mother back to her native Iran when she was just a kid. It wasn't until recently that Samin realized that trip changed her life and Samin's golden chicken soup. And those giant lemons we squeezed in it are both the result of that epiphany and a love note to her spiritual home. Now, Samine you will hear is a big personality with a waterfall of a laugh, and her excitement is almost contagious. She's a fast-talker, really fast-talker, but also a really calming presence. After we sampled that delicious soup in Simeon's kitchen, we shuffled over to a cozier spot in her Oakland home. The place where she cooks herself much simpler meals throughout the day. And when I saw that space, I couldn't believe it.

For a woman with so much culinary prowess. Yeah, this kitchen is tiny. It's even smaller than the little one. It is tiny. This place looked almost like a galley kitchen on a boat. Lots of wood, lots of hanging pots and pans and utensils. But like most of our kitchens, she even has an appliance that needs fixing.

The beauty stove that's currently broken. I assume someone's going to get on that. I'll fix that for you. We settled into her big oversized couch, pot-bellied fireplace in the corner, shoes off, socks on, and a steady rain tapping at the window. With her dog, Fava Bean, cosied up at my feet,

I learned more about Samine's story. Tell us about your mom's kitchen. Tell us about your mom's kitchen. Um, growing up, my mom's kitchen was absolutely the center of our home. It was always every day filled with so many good smells. My family's from Iran and my mom is an extraordinary Persian cook. Although she cooks all sorts of other stuff too and I didn't actually know until much, much later, actually just a few years ago that she was mostly self-taught once she came to the States because she wasn't really cooking when she was still in Iran. You know, there were people who did that for

the family. And so I have two brothers, we had sort of our kitchen table in the middle of the kitchen and we had our spots, our assigned seats that were, you know, with our placements and our things that we like to use. And so every morning, we'd come out and have Persian breakfast, which is like flatbread and cheese and tea and jams. And it was just the warm place. You know, every day my mom asked us, she's all about fairness. And so she was all about rotating,

like now that I write for people, I understand like a huge part of the tires and part of cooking is deciding what to make. And so my mom put that on us. I wasn't that picky, but one of my brothers is really picky eater. And so she's like,, you're gonna be picky, you guys have to choose.

And then like if we chose, she would make that thing. So there were sort of these like rotating days of my brothers and I choosing and I grew up in San Diego and it was a strange combination of full-on immigrant family mixed with only shopping at the hippie natural grocery food store. So like there was a lot of like, Harub and silly and hippies. Natural food store. So like there was a lot of like, hair up and silly and hippie natural food store.

This is the four whole foods. Yeah, yeah, well, well before that. Yeah, so we had to like cross town to go to the co-op or cross town to go, because everything was in bins. Yeah, and my mom, you know, I mean, I immediately understood it instinctively as soon as I started working as a cook

and understood the importance of like sourcinger ingredients. But, you know, my grandparents had a citrus orchard in the north of Iran on the Caspian Sea. And so the thing, all the immigrants everywhere, always are after that taste of home. And the highest compliment a thing could get was this taste like Iran. She was always after the taste of the produce that tasted the most like the stuff from home and that was usually the organic stuff or the fresh from the farmer's market stuff. And it wasn't even necessarily some sort of like ideological choice that she was making. It was much more about taste. She was looking for home. Yeah. Yeah. We spent a lot of our time

as kids in the car driving all over Southern California to all of these stores to So yeah to like Middle Eastern stores or there were a lot of Mexican groceries my dad would actually drive to Mexico to get citrus fruit that you can't find in the States like sweet limes and sour oranges and things like that that we had back home that you can't just like readily find at the grocery store here So that we could always have those tastes in our kitchen and I remember my parents eating persimmons I just remember as a kid thinking persimmons were like the grossest thing ever because I had a bite of them And they were I must have eaten on a super unripe Hachia persimmon Which is the kind that has to be really soft and almost like pudding texture when it's ripe. I don't know if Iranians all Iranians eat them

when they're not ripe or just my family gave me a piece before it was ripe, but if you eat it before it's ripe, it's very tannic and dries out your mouth. So as a kid, I was like, oh, persimmon's are disgusting. You know, and now I understand there's two different kinds. And so, but there was just a lot of exposure to tastes and smells and ingredients that were

absolutely not the things I encountered at school. So tell me about that. What was it? First of all, what do your lunchbox look like? I don't know. I don't know how old I used to. I'm 43. So I definitely had like a metal lunchbox.

I had a flying nun lunchbox. Oh, but I do know what the flying nun is, but I didn't watch that show that was before by time. With Sally Field, I totally did. Yeah, but I went to the little Catholic school with the flying nuns lunch box. Yeah, that's pretty rad. I probably had care bears or something like that. And I always get rusty.

Yeah, they would get rusty on the inside. Yeah, and one thing we have that my mom would make, that makes a good leftover lunch is these little sort of, almost like little meatloaf patties called coltlet. So I would take those and then people would be like, oh, what's that? It looks like poop. You know, I remember being in kindergarten and coming home being like, oh, the kid said my lunch looks like poop. But then also I was like, well, it tastes good. Like I also, I didn't, I wasn't that upset, you know, for that long because I was like, my lunch is good. So it was fine. but yeah, I definitely didn't have

the standard like PBJ. Eventually my mom did make us PBJs, but they were because it's shopped at the hippie store. It was like on the driest cold green, hard bread with like peanut butter, like stir oil in and like, you know, separate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was like, you know,

it was clinging to the river, your mouth the whole day. But the jam was probably jam. The jam was actually jam. Yeah, totally. So, but my brothers and I talk about this a lot. Like, definitely her love language was cooking for us and taking care of us through food. And I don't think that was ever a life that she

foresaw for herself, you know, necessarily cooking for her. Yeah, because there are people cooking for her. And there were a lot of unexpected sort of turns in her life that led her to where we ended up. And so I don't think she expected to end up sort of spending her days in the kitchen. But she did. And that was absolutely like an incredible gift. And I know it's something a lot of people don't have as somebody at home cooking for them every day of their whole childhood. So I definitely appreciate that. Music

Knowing who's to mean us today, it might come as a surprise that despite being gifted with so much home-cooked Persian food while she grew up, being a chef was not even on her mind when she left for college. She had big plans ahead in a different direction, until she tasted one meal that was so delicious that it blew her mind and changed the rest of her life. I've wanted to be a writer since... Well, first I was like, Iranian all-running kids are like,

you gotta be a doctor or a lawyer engineer. So most of my childhood I was like, I'm gonna be a doctor lawyer. No, a doctor, no. I don't even know, I don't know. I don't know what I could. I know, I just was like, I don't know what. And then I was like,

but I didn't actually. But I didn't actually. Yeah, totally. But then I had this amazing English teacher in 11th grade and I was like, I don't actually want to do any of those things. I want to be a writer, like I love writing, which was a huge disappointment to my family.

And so I came to school in Berkeley and I was English major and I wanted to write and I'm the oldest kid in an immigrant family and like my dad was not super present in my academic life and my mom was busy sort of raising three kids. And so I definitely had to figure out everything on my own like how to take the PSAT and the SAT and the AP tests and all that stuff and get myself to college. And I was sort of watching all my friends do that. And I did, I was always like the best student and I got myself to school and I

got a scholarship and the whole thing. But then I was like in college as an English major and I was like, then what do you do? You know what I mean? I guess I'm just going to go to more school. I guess I'll just keep going and become a professor. But then my my main sort of professor mentor was like, Oh no, I won't write. He wouldn't write me a recommendation for a PhD. He was like, no, you love writing too much. You care about it too deeply.

Academia will squash your soul. So he was like, this is not for you. Don't get a PhD. So I was like, truly didn't know what to do. I thought maybe I would get a MFA in poetry. So I applied to that and I got accepted. But by then I had had this sort of life changing meal. And in my family, we didn't, we did not eat in fancy restaurants.

That was not a place where we spent money. We ate around table pizza on Wednesdays. And when we went out for a celebration, it was to a Persian restaurant. Usually we drive to Orange County and have like, chill a cup of. I was not eating in any fancy white tablecloth places. Like I didn't even know that that existed, what that was. So there's a restaurant in Berkeley called Shapanese, which was founded in 1971 by Alice Waters.

And so when I came to Berkeley, my freshman orientation, at some point, somebody was like, oh, and there's this fancy restaurant in town, it's a place your parents should take you called Shapanese and I was like, not my parents. So I was like white people's parents. So I was like, white people's parents. And so it kind of like went in one year and went out the other.

And then my sophomore year, I had this boyfriend and we really bonded over eating, like our love of food. And he had always wanted to go to shape and yeast. So we saved our money for eight months. We saved $200, so we could go there. So we went there and it was this very special meal, very amazing. It was special about it.

The building itself is an old home and so you really feel that still, I think, when you go in and it's actually really small. It's very cozy. Yeah, and it's so cozy and like, I mean, for me, as a 19 year old, it felt incredibly fancy, but I think it also just felt cozy. There's like copper, light fixture, so all the light is really warm, and it's a fixed

menu, so it's kind of like you're eating at someone's house and you're just getting what they're serving, and we had a friend who was a bus are there, so they had told them that we had saved our money for so long. They thought it was really charming, So they were so nice to us. And I think they were doding on us a little bit extra. And also, I think it was very funny that these two young people, we were out of place in this room. Yeah.

What do you think? I think it was like frisé, oh, lardone, which is like a classic sort of French bistro salad. And it maybe had chantrol mushrooms in it. So it's a frisé, it's like a white curly undive, and it had little pieces of bacon or pentetun, chantrol mushrooms. And then I remember being really nervous because the second course was halibut, which is just like a simple flaky whitefish. I think it was in a broth, but I was so sheltered. I had really only ever had salmon, trout, and shrimp.

I really ate very little seafood. So I was like, I was like, am I gonna like this? So I had to eat that. I totally liked the halibut. The main course was, I think, a quail was a little bird. And then the dessert was chocolate souffle. And I had never had souffle before. So when the server brought it, she was like,

oh, have you ever had souffle before? And I said, no, she said, would you like me to show you how to eat it? And I was like, okay. So she said, you poke a hole in it with your spoon and you pour this sauce in so that every bite has sauce. And it was like a raspberry sauce. So I did that and I took a bite and she said,

how is it? I was like, oh, it's really good. But you know what would make it even better? She was like is it? I was like, oh, it's really good, but you know what would make it even better? She was like, what? I was like, oh, glass of cold milk. Cause I was like, I was like, it's this warm chocolatey thing. You know what I mean?

Like warm brownie cold milk. And she was just like, what? Like, she was like, you want milk? And I was like, yeah. And I mean, I was so innocent. I didn't know. So she brought me milk and then she brought us each like a little sip of dessert wine to show us

the refined accompaniment. But what brought you like, yeah, yeah. What there was so fun. And later, later, did I realize like this was like, totally uncouth. But it was just this sort of very warm, loving experience. And I think for me, what stayed with me much more than any of the, the food was nice, but like it wasn't by any means like the most

delicious food I'd ever had. I just ever had. I just never had felt like, Oh, everything is so thought through and taking care of. If we ran out of butter, the new butter appeared. If we ran out of water, the new water, like every detail was so thoughtful and loving. And I always worked through college. So we had friends who were bussers there. So I applied to be a busser there.

And so I wrote a letter and I was like, Dermas waters. Like I had a dinner with this magical like, dear Ms. Waters, like I had dinner, this magical dinner, as for Melbourne. I didn't actually say that in the thing. And then I brought my resume and they're like, oh, you have to bring that to the floor manager. So then they like brought me over to the floor manager when she opened the door. It was the souffle lady. And so she was like, oh, yeah, I was like, oh, yeah, she hired me. I started the next day. And so I bus tables for a year, but pretty immediately I was so curious about the kitchen and that sort of coincided with my senior year of college

when I'm like, wait a minute, I'm an English major. What am I gonna do? Like all my friends were graduating becoming consultants, I didn't even know what that. I still couldn't tell you what a consultant does and like I would go to a job fair and I was like, I don't even have a close-for-man tailor. Like I didn't have any, you know, I just in my heart, I was like, I'll die if I have to

sit in a cubicle. And then I would go bust tables and walk through this kitchen and it smelled so good. And all the food we got to taste was so delicious. These people just were so passionate about what they did. And I was like, what if I did this? It wasn't that I had some lifelong dream to be a cook. It was just that I had no idea what else to do. And this was this kind of amazing, inspiring, beautiful thing right before me. wasn't that I had some lifelong dream to be a cook, it was just that I had no idea what else to do.

And this was this kind of amazing, inspiring, beautiful thing right before me. So you went to Berkeley thinking that you were going to be for a time a lawyer doctor and then a writer, but now you are an author, a teacher, and you're a chef. When and how did you make that leap? I asked a lot of questions. I volunteered for a long time. I asked what it would take for me to get an internship. And they're like, gave me a list of like 30 books and they're like, go read all these books and cook from them. You know, I think they also probably were like, she'll never do this. And then I said it. Yeah, I read somewhere and let me get this right.

Did you miss your college graduation because you took a shift? It went, yeah, yeah. Wait, what's the story? I just... I just... I just... I just...

I just... I just... I just... I just... I just... I've never been like a super school spirit person. And, you know, like, I think I've kind of laid out how my family's a little bit disconnected.

And so it wasn't gonna be ever a thing where like my whole family came to town and took me out to dinner and celebrated this achievement. Anyway, to me, I've just felt expected that I had the graduate. I didn't feel like it was something that I deserved a claim for. And then so then I went to work. And then later that summer, at the end of that summer was the 40th birthday of Shae Penis.

And it was this really beautiful party on the campus. We're cooking like 20 lambs and a huge pot of bouleabes. And it was right in front of the English building. And my mind, I was like, this is my graduation. You know, I just was like, this is bouleabez and it was right in front of the English building and my mind I was like this is my graduation. You know, I just was like this is where I belong. So it was, that's beautiful. It was okay. It wasn't a sad thing for me at all.

It's funny. I have this like two parts of me. One of them is I feel like I've just been invisible my whole life and like not ever getting credit for the things that I do. But then the minute I become a visible person, I'm like, stop looking at me. You know, so I wouldn't have, I think I would have been deeply uncomfortable

with everybody staring at me from my family. Like, ugh, that was, that was my, it's not what I would have wanted. Like I just would prefer people to see me for who I am. You're listening to the Audible original, Your Mom is Kitchen. Like what you're hearing, the next episode is available now, exclusively from Audible. You can listen to new episodes on Audible two weeks before you can hear them anywhere else. the chef and author who's credited with creating America's farm to table movement. That led to an internship and a job.

Then the renowned Tuscan chef and writer Benadetta Vitale showed up for a book signing. Simeen begged the chef to let her apprentice with her in Florence, and it must have been a pretty good speech because Benadetta agreed. After two years in Italy, Simea returned to California and went back to Chapones to work for her mentor. She cooked and cooked. She began incorporating writing into her practice

and became the Simea we know today. She's an American cook, strongly influenced by French and Italian culinary traditions, but recently, a long forgotten memory of a special trip Simeon took with her mother resurfaced in her thoughts and gave Simeon a new understanding of what some of her most

important influences might have been all along. So I've always in my heart been like, wow, my aesthetic education really came from Chépanise and it really came from my time in Italy, which was at this very formative age, like, you know, learning how to love flowers and gardens and textiles and just surround myself with artists and makers, that was, I felt like these values that I learned in my early 20s. And recently, I had this memory of when I was 14,

I went to Iran with my mom. We went and visited one of her best friends and who's since passed away. And she lived in a neighborhood in Tehran. So this neighborhood is kind of like in the foothills of the mountains. And it's a very old and beautiful neighborhood. And the homes are really old. And we went there to visit her friend who was like one of her, it's like one of her two best friends. And she had these two daughters. I was 14 the daughters were maybe six and eight.

And we got there. And I don't never heard of these people, you know, I'd never met that. And we get there, we get out of the car and these girls start just running me around and showing me around the property. And there's just trees everywhere. There's all these fruit trees everywhere. And apricot trees and almond trees. And it was like probably May, June, July. And so there are a snack, like a treasured snack in Iran, is to eat almonds before they're fully ripe. You pluck them in their green almonds so that what becomes the shell is still kind of like a green fuzzy skin, and you can bite into it, and it's this crunchy thing that has like, it's just the whole thing's crunchy and you sprinkle

salt. So they showed me like how to pluck those from the tree and eat them. They're like, it's just the whole thing is crunchy and you sprinkle salt. So they showed me how to pluck those from the tree and eat them. They're like, oh, these are apricot trees, these are this. And I was like, that was probably my first time in an orch, I mean, I grew up in San Diego, so it was a lot in citrus orchards, but that was my first time in a stone fruit orchard. And they had this pool, this beautiful pool that was like handmade, hand dug,

and they would drain it every day and refill it with mountain water fresh mountain water from because it's they were at the foothills of the mountain and it was the holiest like stream water but like so refreshing was this a huge dark beautiful pool. And the house was the style of house kind of like a. It was like a two story home that was built in four sides around a central atrium. And a lot of that outward-facing walls, there would just be sort of indoor outdoor spaces with just old Persian carpets and ceramics everywhere. And also their rooms were filled with in-sync posters.

I mean, they're still girls. I remember, I think we spent the night there. I remember they were showing me after running around all day on the farm. They're like, oh, we go to the bathtub and we wash our feet. And I'm like, you wash your feet. They're like, you don't wash your feet. And it was such a sweet thing, but their home was just so filled with all these beautiful textures and colors and handmade things and their mom was an artist. And there was this little boy who lived nearby and he came over and his name was Doston.

And in Farsi, I'd never heard anyone with that name because that word just means story. And I remember thinking about that for a long time and years later realizing like, oh, they were hippies. That's a hippie name to name your kid a word. You know, they were artists. They were creative people. And I've had no access to that my whole life because I've only, I've been so confined to just a very limited sort of portion of our people

and a very limited picture of who we are and what we have in the world and also being pelted by what everyone else is pelted by, that Iranians are terrorists and whatever and trying to defend myself from that, you know. And so here I am thinking everything that's good about me comes from Alice Waters and Italy and Europe and white people. But actually, when I was 14, this magical thing happened for me. And these people who were so special that it's like stayed with me for 30 years.

And what else could there have been? What else is there like that? So then I like maniacally started trying to find that neighborhood on Google Maps. I have one Persian friend who's an artist who lives here who I called and I was like describing this home to her and she was like, oh, that's where my grandparents lived. And she said, you know,

it's mean when I met you 10 years ago, you were always like, I don't trust your audience. I don't like being near them. They're so hard on me. And I always was really sad about that, because there's so much beauty in our culture. And she's like, no, I've lived here long enough to understand your skepticism.

But I always wished you could see, and I'm like, no, I get it. So I have a lot of sadness about the thing that I never got to see. And also probably that's been wiped away from our country. You know, I don't know. I don't know. I'm still figuring out what my relationship to Iran is via cooking and what my way there will be through that.

But I do think like there is something in me for lack of a better phrase. This is so cheesy as like, I feel very like, because I feel so lost, I'm always looking for that wherever I go. Like I feel very much like citizen of the world, you know? When you're like, my mom is kitchen, I'm like, well, what about Gary's mom's kitchen?

What about someone's mom's kitchen? Like I could tell you about all these people's, you know, I could tell you about my Korean friends mom's kitchen or my, you know, my Indian mom's friends kitchen. Cause I'm always just like, tell me about your life, tell you about my Korean friends mom's kitchen or my Indian mom's friends kitchen, because I'm always just like, tell me about your life, tell me about your life, tell me about your life, because I've had so little access to my own past. Did that memory come back to you recently? The summer, yeah.

Memories visit us sometimes when we need them. Yeah. And clearly this was something that I don't want to say it filled a hole. But yeah, it was really it was really moving. It was really moving. Yeah. Remember that chicken soup I got to savor at the beginning of this episode. Let's get back to that.

Does that mean do you think your mother knew that there was something that would be missing in your life because they had fled their country and was food away that she tried to give that back to you? Absolutely, I think food was the main way she tried to give it back to us. Uh, um, and it worked. It really worked.

I would say it's my like main way that I feel familiar with my culture. It's like the main way that I feel connection to my culture. Certainly my palette is very, very Iranian. Iranians have a very, very acidic palette. Say more about that. Iranians don't really love sweet things. Although I love sweet things, but they just want everything more sour. Like more sour, more lemon, more lemon, squeeze the lemon, squeeze the lime, squeeze the lime, more vinegar, put a pickle on it, put yogurt on it, and I have an incredibly acidic palette.

Like I always want more like that's just, I grew up, my mom would sit in a lemon tree and snack on lemons as a kid. Iranians, like my face face puff when I do this. Iranian, a snack that we have is called LaVoshack, which is a, you know, LaVoshbred is like the thin bread. So LaVoshack is like, it's kind of named for that. It's fruit leather, because it's like,

looks like LaVoshbred. The most traditional one is made with really sour plums. It's like, has almost no sugar or no sugar in it. And so it's just like the most sour, it's kind of like a treat to get that thing where your cheeks are so... You know where your cheeks meet the back of your throat? You can't really smell. They're like cramping. Don't be like, if you wanted to go down into your throat. Yeah. And so people like, they're like, they're like, I just want the more sour treats, you know, sour cherries. We are like, screw regular cherries. I want sour cherries.

So it's amazing to hear you talk about this because of course, many of us know you through your work on Netflix, but also we were many, in many cases myself included first introduced to you through your cookbook, salt fat acid heat. So you were basically helping people understand. Acid, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, and that's definitely a big part of my pal, like I would say the acidity and like my relationship to acidity is for sure my runniness, like is is 100% like that was not something I had to be taught by cooks. So we want to gift our listeners with a recipe. Okay. And particularly when we talk to someone like you. So when you think about your mom's kitchen

and the through line from her world to yours, is there a recipe that you would want us to think about? For sure. I've been sharing with our listeners. Absolutely. I definitely do. And I actually, when I got this question, I was like, what perfect timing? Because I actually have some that I can heat up for you. Last January, February, I started making chicken soup a lot.

And this is one of those things where I had in my head that because I had learned sort of in the French Italian style a way of cooking, right? That you have to make your very rich stock. And that's the base for your chicken soup and all of this stuff. And then anytime I would try to make say like a mots of all soup and I did it that way, it never tasted right. It always tasted kind of too cloying and I couldn't figure out why. So then I went down this like mots of all soup rabbit hole. sometime in the early like pandemic I think. And I started reading a lot of like Jewish mom blogs, you know, and like just some Motsuball soup experts.

I realized like, oh, wait a minute, like they don't start with like a rich chicken stock. They start with a chicken and water in a pot. And they bear, they only cook it for like 90 minutes. And it's a much lighter, cleaner tasting broth. So I started making a lot of like sort of chicken and a pot kind of soups, which is a much easier way to make soup, honestly, than spend a whole day

making stock and then make your soup. So then I was like, well, if I were gonna make this, what would it be? And so then I started putting other things in the pot. And somehow, I don't know how I got there, but it was just this thing where I started putting other things in the pot. And somehow, I don't know how I got there, but it was just this thing where I started just putting things in the pot. And I was like, it was also gray rainy.

It was kind of a day like this. Like it was cold and rainy. And so I put some ginger and some turmeric and a whole bunch of saffron and cardamom. And I like have to lemon and put a lemon in there. And then I was started eating it and I was like, is this a weird like newvo goop recipe? Or like, you know, just putting it whenever I put

turmeric in something, I'm like, am I just being like a white lady putting turmeric in things? Or is there reason for it to be here? And then I was like, wait a minute. My mom always made like I actually hated chicken soup when I was little because my mom put so much lemon in it back to the acidic mouth. She would make this kind of barley and chicken soup and then just squeeze so much lemon in it probably to give us the vitamin C to kill whatever was sick. But I was like this

is painful to eat. I don't want to eat it. You know, and there was always saffron and turmeric in there. And so there was a thing where I was like, wait a minute, this actually in a weird way, I've circled back to my childhood, like through this strange journey. And my mom certainly would never spend an entire day making a French stock. Like my mom would put chicken in water

and make chicken, that she calls it like broth, basically. She would just make a broth and that would be the base of her soup. So there was this way where I was like, this is my version of my mom's chicken soup. Yeah, so that's what I have. And like a golden chicken delicious. You put as much lemon as your mom did. I put, and then when I sit down, I squeeze more lemon into it.

And then I have some cardamom ghee. I like to sizzle and put that in there. I'm on ghee. Yeah, it's so good. And then if I have, I don't have rice right now, but it's nice with a little rice. Or I'm working on like a crazy spice motsuball. You put a motsuball in there with all the spices. That's good too.

Oh, how delicious. Simea and I have love talking to you. Thank you so much. I could spend all day here with your friends. Oh, please, you're right. And Fava bean just chilled out right here. Yeah. Beanie's like, beie could sleep all day.

Beanie's just like, don't ever make me get up. It's a good life. Yeah, she has a good life. And this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much. I would love talking to you. Me too. For me.

I love talking to you. Me too. Me too. Me too. Sometimes it takes years for us to cherish the things in our lives that are most sacred. Sometimes those things have been inside us all along. Samine's path to finding that sacred part of her center, her soul, was circuitous, and listening to her unlock that journey was a privilege.

And the byproduct of that journey, that delicious, tart, savory soup that we tasted with her is something you can bring to life in your own home. Check out my Instagram page to find her special recipe so you can try some of it in your own kitchen. And I suggest some extra lemon, of course. My dad used to have this saying, he'd say that really good food, the stuff that made him think about his mama's kitchen back in Alabama tasted like a letter from home. As a kid, I used to think that that saying was kind of weird. As a teenager, I'd roll my eyes because he said it all the time. As an adult who would give almost anything to have another meal with him, I totally

get it. Sometimes food does feel like a letter from home. Special delivery. Food for the soul. Thanks so much for joining me today on your Mama's Kitchen. I'm Michele Norris. Come back next week. When you open the cabinet, it's like a wall of a roll mod. Oh, there's so many spices. All the spices, you know, it's very well organized. I have a good assistant. It's very well organized. I have a good assistant. That means I appreciate your honesty. This has been a higher ground and audible original produced by higher ground studios.

Senior producer Natalie Rinn, producer Sonia Tan, and associate producer Angel Carreras. Sound design and engineering from Andrew Epen and Roy Baum. Higher ground audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camilla Thertacous. Executive producers for higher ground are Nick White, Mukde Mohan, Dan Fehrman, and me, Michele Norris. Executive producers for Audible are Nick DiAngelo and Anne Heperman. The show's closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels. At tutorial and web support from Melissa Bear and say what media, our talent booker is Angela Paluso. And special thanks this week to Threshold Studios. Chief content officer for Audible is Rachel Giazza,

and that's it. Goodbye everybody. Make sure and come back to see what we're serving up next week. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Sound recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. I'll see.